“I wish to allow the
neck to release, to allow the head to go FORWARD and UP, to allow the
spine to lengthen and the back to widen, while allowing the legs out
of the pelvis.”

When one pays for an Alexander lesson, one is paying primarily for an Alexander teacher to put
meaning into those words. This is what FM Alexander's niece Marjory
Barlow told me: The teacher's job in every Alexander lesson is “to
put meaning into those words.”

“Those words” means
some variation of I wish to allow the neck to release, to allow
the head to go FORWARD and UP, to allow the spine to lengthen and the
back to widen, while sending the knees forwards and away.

Before meaning has been
put into those words, those words do not have any meaning. So words
are not necessarily full of meaning. Effort has to be made to put
meaning into the words.

I was very fortunate to witness on many occasions Marjory Barlow in her 80s, when she did not
have a lot of energy to spare, directing her effort to put meaning
into those words for my benefit: “Let the neck be free, to let the
head to go FORWARD and UP, to let the spine lengthen and the back to
widen, while sending the knees [up to the ceiling (when lying on
one's back with knees bent)].”

There would be a
stimulus to move (i.e. “move your leg”), to which I was to say
“No.” So this was the first word into which meaning had to be
put – “No.” I gradually learned, and have continued gradually
learning since Marjory died in 2006, what I must say “No” to,
which is whatever thought or idea or decision or desire triggers the
wrong inner patterns (aka the doing) which I wish to stop.

Into the gap thus
vacated by saying “No,” those words would repeatedly be poured:
“Let the neck be free, to let the head go FORWARD and UP, to let
the spine lengthen and the back widen, while sending the knees up
to the ceiling,” while Marjory used her hands (wherein, she used to
say, after more than 60 years of consciously using them, her brain
resided) to put meaning into those words.

And then, at some
point, I would go ahead and move my leg, thus eventually giving
consent to respond to the original stimulus “Move your leg.”
Without this act of moving, the whole procedure would not have been
meaningful. So not only the word “No” and the verbal directions,
but also the movement, the ultimate gaining of the end in view, was
also a part of the procedure that was full of meaning. And, although
“move your leg,” is three words, it is fairly readily apparent,
with regular practice, that the actual movement of one's leg is not the thinking of words. Moving the leg is an action, a meaningful action, and at the same time, an unspeakable action.

Thus, while in the 3rd
pāda of today's verse avācyam artham ostensibly means “the thing
he was not supposed to say” (i.e. the fact that all human beings,
after growing old and/or getting ill, ultimately die), I think the
real meaning of avācyam artham is to point to the kind of “unspeakable meaning” towards which the Alexander teacher Marjory Barlow endeavoured so consciously
and so skilfully to direct my attention.

Again in the 3rd
pāda, avācyam artham imam ostensibly means “this thing he was not
supposed to say,” so that imam simply means “this,” or “the
following.” But
the real meaning that Aśvaghoṣa had in mind with imam (“this
here”) in the phrase artham-imam, “this here meaning” or “the
meaning in question,” might be the meaning expressed
by 即 (Jap: SOKU), “here
and now,” in the famous phrase in Chinese Zen 即身是仏
(Jap: SOKU-SHIN-ZE-BUTSU), “the mind here and now is
buddha.”

In the 4th pāda,
artha-vat means “meaningfully” or “with a purpose.” I have
translated artha-vat a bit loosely as “in a voice full of meaning.”
Again the phrase brings to my mind a teaching of Marjorry Barlow's,
which was that when as an Alexander teacher one speaks directions like "head FORWARD and UP," one should never garble those directions, and Marjory indeed never
did. Even though she had been saying them constantly for nearly 70
years, it always sounded like Marjory, as she spoke the directions
out loud, was discovering them herself for the first time. Never
“head-forward-and-up,” but “head FORWARD, and UP!” Because
Marjory had spent her lifetime thinking like that, her voice itself
conveyed meaning. She used both her hands and her voice to put
meaning into the words. At the same time, because of the way she accepted
and used herself, her voice conveyed unspeakable meaning.

I think that Aśvaghoṣa
had in mind this kind of transmission of meaning when in the 4th
pāda he used the word pravyājahāra, from pra-vy-ā-√hṛ, which
primarily means “to speak,” but which has a secondary meaning of
“to utter inarticulate sounds.” The point is that when a buddha
uses her voice to convey unspeakable meaning, it is by no means only
the words that are doing the conveying. What is doing the conveying
is rather the consciously-controlled use of her voice, her hands, and
the whole of herself – while the fickle horses of her senses
remain in a calm, submissive state.

He gave his own account in the first chapter of his third book, The Use of the Self; but for a summary there is none better than the one in here:

http://the-middle-way.org/subpage2.html

These accounts tell of Alexander's discovery of what he called "faulty sensory appreciation," along with "the force of habit," and "a primary control of the use of the self," and his evolution of a technique for circumventing faulty sensory appreciation and employing the primary control for good rather than ill in working against habit.

The task of Alexander students is to re-discover in our own experience what Alexander discovered, and to make the technique our own. The touch of a teacher's hands can speed up that process, but speed is not necessarily of the essence.

Marjory was adamant that transmission via the hands was secondary. The teacher's primary task is to teach a pupil how to work on himself.

But yes, she did often wonder at how FM managed to work it all out for himself without any teacher to guide him, with or without touch.

Tasmania at the end of the 19th century must have been a place of rugged individuals where people learned early to fend for themselves.